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IT WAS ADORNO’S IDEA that capitalism had stripped philosophy of its revolutionary capacities. What was left was art, the last emancipator and partisan of truth. But Adorno was using the word “truth” (or Wahrheitsgehalt, “truth-value”) in a way that was already becoming outmoded. His “truth” always …

I’ve come to regard this as Franzen’s Jewish Problem: Denise’s overrelished Judeophilia in The Corrections, blatantly counterpointed with her mother Enid’s overrelished Judeophobia; the depiction in Freedom of Jewish neocons rallying around the Iraq War, and its ridiculous portrayal of a New York d…

“My explicitly stated goal,” Franzen writes of himself in 1980s Berlin, “was to save the American novel—from social one-dimensionality, from critical preoccupation with the prison-house of language, from the off-putting avant-gardism of Pynchon and his kind.” Apparently, he stayed inside and smoked…

[...] Silvio Berlusconi, who took a break from his women and media companies and the media company that is Italy to arrange partial funding and take a tax break on art. [...]

Engels once said that he learned more about France from Balzac than from “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.” Paul Lafargue, in his Reminiscences of Marx, writes that Marx—who was born in 1818, the year Balzac decided to dedicate his life to writing—…